In the autumn of 1977, John Mariani and his new wife, Galina, took a culinary drive across the U.S. that ground to a halt in Birmingham, Alabama, when a waitress in velveteen shorts served up a really terrible steak.

“The entryway on Goldman Sachs ’s executive floor is hung with paintings of all the senior partners since the firm’s inception,” says June Breton Fisher . “I took a close look and finally asked, ‘Where’s my grandfather?’”

On June 29, 2007, the first iPhone went on sale. The Apple Inc. device benefited from breathless advance buzz and also had its skeptics: It cost $600 and had no physical keyboard, limited e-mail options and no copy-and-paste.

Effective or not, bailouts somehow seem unjust. Why use taxpayer money to save the companies that actually caused the meltdown, the banks that made the reckless loans, and insurance companies that wrote too many credit- default swaps? More broadly, why save the state and local governments that offered overly generous pensions? Or auto companies too fat and lazy to match foreign competitors? They deserve to suffer the consequences of their behavior.

In the 21st century, burning hydrocarbons is critical to achieving the economic expansion that is needed to support the billions of new people who are projected to inhabit the planet. Yet chasing that growth could throw so much carbon into the atmosphere that it may undermine humanity’s very survival.